Hitler's Nazi party financed WW II with stolen Jewish money

BERLIN: German Chancellor Adolf Hitler's Nazi party 'actively worked to destroy Europe's Jews financially,' and financed 30 per cent of the German war with their robbed money, according to researchers.

According to the Daily Mail, Nazi officials robbed 120 billion reichsmarks, over 12 billion pounds, by looting and through confiscation laws.

The figure has been revealed in a study by the German finance ministry to uncover its crimes while the Nazis were in power, from 1933 till 1945.

The paper quoted Hans-Peter Ullmann, a Cologne University history professor who is heading the three-year investigation, as saying that under the Nazis the tax authorities "actively worked to destroy Jews financially".

"Conservatively, their money financed at least 30 per cent of the German war effort," he added.

Tax laws discriminated against Jews from 1934, while some who managed to leave Germany before the Holocaust had much of their wealth seized through an 'exit tax'.

Christiane Kuller, of Munich University, who is working on the study, said that tax offices built hierarchies of bureaucrats "who discovered dwellings and bank accounts and emptied them."

Nazi officials seized and sold the property of Jews who left or were sent to extermination camps, both in Germany and in the nations conquered during the Second World War, the paper said.